Hillary Clinton Quotes

I think life is hard at the combat outposts, and anything that distracts us from supporting them, in my mind, is something that we shouldn't do.

'Shortly Thereafter' chronicles all the aspects of an Afghanistan deployment, from the terrors of the unknown that await before leaving, to the perverse thrills and adrenaline rushes found in combat, to the return home to a land and a people now more foreign than the war itself was.

Please God, I'll never be in a war zone, but everything I sort of know about people who come back is that it's a hard transition to make. I mean, even if you've not been in a war, even if you've just been in the Forces, you come back and probably have more fights in civilian life.

I think I may try and write something about my pretty extraordinary experience with the 101st in Iraq.

Keep no troops on the field too long

Combat stress isn't the only problem for soldiers isolated in Iraq - there are family issues, re-integration issues when soldiers go home on leave, loneliness.

U.S. soldiers, with whom I now have more than a passing acquaintance, joke that they track my movements in order to know where they will be deployed next.

I'm not afraid of IED's, bullets, mortars.

When I was in the war, I was lucky that I was in a plane and never saw the carnage close-up.

Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

You know, veterans come home and they may not be bipolar, but after they've been through a war with PTSD or a head injury, their families have a handful when they come home.

It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.

Human nerves quickly get accustomed to the most unusual conditions and circumstances and I noticed that quite a number of men actually fell asleep from sheer exhaustion in the trenches, in spite of the roaring of the cannon about us and the whizzing of shrapnel over our heads.

My younger brother is a decorated combat veteran and was a platoon leader in Iraq.

The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

You're in a combat zone one day. You come home, and then you have to readjust, and it takes a few days. We just sit in the house, hang with the family and then things get better.

After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.

We are particularly interested in the mental health programs and policies that support our troops and their families before, during, and after deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Much as soldiers come back, they've been in combat or the edge of it and suddenly that adjustment back to civilian life is a real challenge.

Grunts on the line, where the enemy wants them dead, still goof off - even knowing that by letting their guard down they might die.

Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.

Is it true that the American people are war-weary? Absolutely. We are tired of sending our sons and daughters to distant lands year after year after year, to give their lives trying to transform foreign nations.

The overall physical demand that Iraq has is pretty amazing. It's 130 degrees, and the soldiers are carrying about 100 pounds of extra gear. It's a pretty rigorous schedule and routine for them.

I was in the Navy and saw, first-hand, the effects of front-line combat.

Bad as was being shot by some of our own troops in the battle of the Wilderness, - that was an honest mistake, one of the accidents of war, - being shot at, since the war, by many officers, was worse.